Year: 2014
Type: dissertation
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Musical experience may have the potential to influence functional brain development. The present thesis investigated how the maturation of neural auditory discrimination in childhood varies according to the amount of informal musical activities (e.g., singing and musical play) and formal musical training. Neural auditory discrimination was examined by recording auditory event-related potentials (ERP) to different types of sound changes with electroencephalography (EEG) in children of various ages. The relation of these responses to the amount of informal musical activities was examined in 2 3-year-old children. Furthermore, the development of the responses from early school-age until preadolescence was compared between children receiving formal musical training and musically nontrained children. With regard to typical maturation, the results suggest that neural auditory discrimination is still immature at the age of 2 3 years and continues to develop at least until pre-adolescence. Both informal musical experience and formal musical training were found to modulate various stages of neural auditory discrimination. Specifically, in the 2 3-year-old children, a high amount of informal musical activities was associated with response profiles consistent with enhanced processing of auditory changes and lowered distractibility. Furthermore, during school-age, musically trained children showed more rapid development of neural auditory discrimination than nontrained children especially for music-like sounds. Importantly, no differences were seen between the musically trained and nontrained children at the early stages of the training. Therefore, the group differences that emerged at later ages were most likely due to training and did not reflect pre-existing functional differences between the groups. Thus, the results (i) highlight the usefulness of change-related auditory ERPs as biomarkers for the maturation of auditory processing, (ii) provide novel evidence for the role of informal musical activities in shaping auditory skills in early childhood, and (iii) demonstrate that formal musical training shapes the development of neural auditory discrimination.
Source: Työväentutkimus Vuosikirja
Author: Vesa Putkinen
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W568904271